MSI FX5200-TDR128

Company: Micro-Star International (MSI)
Product: FX5200-TDR128
Street Price: ~$115 USD
Date Reviewed: May 10, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey C.
Overall Rating: (9/10)

Conclusions & Final Thoughts:

Price and Features - 10
The MSI GeForce FX5200-TDR is all around a nice product. It might not be anywhere near the fastest card on the market but it is very cheap and has support for DirectX 9 games and also features 8x AGP. Another set of nice features about the card is all of the accessories that comes with it. The TV-Out with remote receiver and remote control, combined with the software gives users a strong multimedia product to turn their computers into entertainment centers. For the price, there simply are not many cards with features like these with the same cost.

Performance - 8
We are not going to give the FX5200 a low rating in this category because it is a budget card. It is not intended to be run at the highest AA/AF settings. The card is intended for average performance with support for the latest gaming titles. It did not perform terribly in our testing anyway. True the AA/AF tests were very tough on the card but performance without AA/AF was decent.

Stability - 10
In general, MSI products are very stable. The card did not give us any problems during the course of this review. MSI is one of the largest manufacturers and will be, as long as they release quality products like we have seen from them in the past. The FX5200 is no exception to this and we were pleased to not have to stress over troubleshooting issues with the card.

Support - 10
Support at MSI as always is flawless. They have a page totally dedicated to support for their products. Drivers, BIOS, manuals, etc. can all be found there. For more information on support, please visit MSI's support page. All the tools can be found there for troubleshooting or just general questions.

Overclocking - 7
We were not able to get close to the speeds of the FX5200 Ultra. The cooling on the card however did do a good enough job for us to get 300/580 out of the card. The performance increase was not bad. The MSI overclocking software makes overclocking easy for beginners but we feel that there are better programs for the more advanced overclockers who like more control.

Overall - 9
The MSI FX5200-TDR128 is a really nice product. All of the features with the support for the new games is a bonus when one considers that the card is just over $100. Though there are not many games that are optimized for use only with DX9, the card should do well until there are games released. Even if the card is not used for gaming, it is still a good piece of hardware for the consumer who wants to or does use their computer as their home multimedia center. Hats off to MSI for making a nice product.